While traditional gaming media has every benchmark under the sun, it’s very rare to find ratings for modern stereoscopic 3D drivers like DDD, iZ3D, and Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision. This is completely understandable because it’s much more time consuming, the drivers don’t work equally well with the available measurement tools (e.g. FRAPS), and game setting expectations are different from one solution to the next.

We’ve been getting our share of graphics cards for game testing, and it got us thinking. What’s stopping us from doing some benchmarking on MTBS? Could we share information that other sites don’t? Let’s find out!

Using both an Nvidia and AMD graphics card, combined with all three driver solutions, we wanted to determine:

1. Can games be fairly benchmarked in stereoscopic 3D?2. What is a realistic game efficiency expectation in 3D?3. How does antialiasing impact S-3D game performance with the different driver solutions?4. Does deeper access to the graphics card directly impact performance?

To be fair, this article is more of a media experiment than a diverse collection of S-3D gaming performance results. Similar to M3GA’s regimented rules, benchmarking should be based on a fixed platform that meets certain criteria. It’s for this reason that we limited benchmarking to just two graphics cards and a handful of tests. We want to get the process down pat, get the required benchmarking equipment, and then we will be able to follow through with a full-fledged service on MTBS.